Rare Replay is a collection of 30 retro games to celebrate the 30th year of beloved British game developer Rare, the studio behind Perfect Dark, Viva Pinata and Banjo Kazooie. If you dig into the Rare Replay bundle on Xbox One you will also find Rare was the outfit behind stone cold classics Snake Rattle and Roll, Digger T Rock: Legend of the Lost City and Solar Jetman: Hunt For The Golden Warpship. Me either.

Show of the Week inspects Rare Replay and revisits Battletoads' turbo tunnel level for another crack at that game's notorious and aggravating hoverbike racing segment. It will be a cinch after all these years, I bet.

When we weren't cursing toads this week, we were wrangling cubes in Portally puzzler QUBE: Director's cut. In QUBE you play an amnesiac astronaut trapped in a giant spacefaring Rubik's Cube on a deadly collision course with Earth. Imagine Armageddon but with physics-based block puzzles in place of Bruce Willis drilling an asteroid. Watch us save the world with cubes, probably, in this gameplay.

Heavy Armor might be the perfect Kinect game, or at least, the most honest, because it reveals how interesting life can be when technology gets in your way. Green-lighted way back when Kinect was known as Project Natal, the game posits a near-future in which a silicon-guzzling microbe has devoured every computer on the planet, setting back the science of combat to roundabouts the close of the first world war. Deprived of GPS, drones and other decadent trappings of 21st century warfare, the Earth's nations are obliged to duke it out in gas-powered mechs or "vertical tanks" that handle as elegantly as elephants in high heels.

The practical consequence for the player is that mechanics and features we take for granted, such as scanning a minimap, are either absent or an absolute bloody chore, as you poke at crackly CRT displays, crank handles and generally do your best not to fall flat on your front bumper. It's a suspiciously ironic choice of supporting fiction for a Kinect title - joined at the hip to a peripheral that was billed as a revolution in how games are played, but which has, by and large, just made games much harder to enjoy.

There's only so much credit you can give From Software's writers on this count, however. Heavy Armor was conceived alongside the original and more expensive version of Kinect, which sported a standalone processor, so labelling its unwieldiness a cheeky commentary on Kinect's impotence is a step too far - the plain truth is that it was developed to run using a more capable device. But that premise remains a charming, playful response to what's supposedly a problem of technology, and if Heavy Armor is a failure in many other respects, it's a courageous one. At a time when most other Kinect developers were quietly introducing controller support, or divesting their work of challenge to make up for recognition issues, only From Software could have put together a game in which you fight the controls as ferociously as you do your enemy.

Among the most ambitious 'free to play' titles available today, World of Tanks gets a visual overhaul on Xbox One that few expected. It's unique for being the only game on Microsoft's box to have cross-platform play with its older Xbox 360 release - where owners of both consoles can play in the same 15v15 online battles. But Xbox One gets plenty of upgrades over and above this, from remade map assets, a new lighting model with high dynamic range (HDR) and improved physics and effects. It's a makeover that puts PC behind in some regards, but can Xbox One claim to offer the true, definitive version?

First up, the basics: Xbox One keeps several features from the existing, bespoke Xbox 360 release that are not available on PC. Developed on the Bigworld engine by Wargaming's Chicago and Baltimore studios, the two console versions offer weather effects such as rain, plus unique time of day settings for each map - features that are not officially available on the PC release without mods. The game design and mode selection are identical between the two consoles too, right down to the camera's field of view setting, and a new Proving Grounds option where players can practice against AI opponents. Microsoft's two machines essentially have parity in their core gameplay features, while PC takes an independent path.

The similarities on console stop there. Xbox One runs at a full native 1920x1080, storming ahead of the last-gen release's 1280x720 image. That drives image quality up hugely in direct comparisons, especially when picking out details to the far end of giant maps like Abbey. Unfortunately the use of what appears to be FXAA post-processing keeps absolute clarity at bay - though jagged edges are treated well enough. Compared to the PC's superior TSSAA option (as added via recent patch 9.9), Xbox One owners miss out on a super-sampling pass, while a temporal component helps PC to avoid pixel crawl during motion. As it stands, Microsoft's platform turns in only adequate results for image treatment, though running at 1080p is obviously a big plus.

Re-Logic's 2D sandbox hit Terraria is heading to 3DS and Wii U in Q1 2016, publisher 505 Games has announced.

Both versions will feature touchscreen controls with online and offline multiplayer. The Wii U version will support up to eight-player multiplayer with four-player split-screen available. The 3DS version, however, is capped at four players total.

Oft likened to a 2D Minecraft, Terraria originally launched on PC in 2011 before being ported to Xbox 360, PS3, Vita, iOS and Android in 2013. It then arrived on PS4 and Xbox One last November.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1771631Fri, 31 Jul 2015 20:16:00 +0100There are now more than 100,000 achievements on Xbox Live

How's your Gamescore getting along? Nearly 10 years on from the launch of Xbox 360, Microsoft's gaming awards system has now passed the 100,000 available achievements mark.

3100 titles have now launched with achievements, with a total of 2,300,227 Gamerscore spread between them.

A TrueAchievements infographic breaks that down even further: 76 per cent of all current achievements are on Xbox 360, followed by 14 per cent on Xbox One and then five per cent on Windows Phone.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1771457Fri, 31 Jul 2015 10:10:00 +0100Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons dated for PS4 and Xbox One

Starbreeze's fantasy adventure Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is coming to PS4 and Xbox One on 12th August, publisher 505 Games has announced.

A retail release will follow on 4th September in Europe and 1st September in North America.

This updated version of the acclaimed adventure will include a director's commentary, soundtrack and art gallery.

The Witcher is getting a pen-and-paper role-playing game spin-off, developer CD Projekt Red has announced.

This RPG will be a collaborative effort between CD Projekt Red and its friends at R.Talsorian Games, the company behind the classic 80s pen-and-paper RPG Cyberpunk 2020. As you may recall, CD Projekt Red is making a video game based on Cyberpunk with its creator Mike Pondsmith.

Unlike the Witcher video games, this RPG will allow players to create a character rather than just pick his clothes and haircut. "The Witcher Role-Playing Game will allow tabletop RPG fans to re-create an array of characters known from the Witcher universe and live out entirely new adventures set within the world of Geralt of Rivia," CD Projekt Red teased.

Editor's note: In accordance with our review policy, this is an early impressions piece based on our time with the first episode of King's Quest. Our final review will be live once the series has reached its conclusion.

It's funny to think that it wasn't so long ago that the idea of "episodic games" was a weird novelty, and pretty much unique to Telltale Games. So strong is that studio's imprint on the concept that it's only recently we've seen games - such as Life is Strange - start to strike out and find their own direction.

At first, it seems this long-awaited reboot of beloved 1980s adventure series King's Quest, which was once going to be produced by Telltale, might struggle to distinguish itself. Thankfully, developer The Odd Gentlemen has something more ambitious in mind, and the end result is a delightful and worthy reinvention of a neglected classic.

On Xbox One, Xbox Live Gold members can download Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes for free during the month of August. That should keep you going until Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain comes out in September.

Meanwhile, How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition will be available as a free download on Xbox One from 16th August to 15th September.

To click or not to click, that is the question. If you've been following Life is Strange thus far, you'll probably be keen to continue on with this pivotal episode on your own save and in your own time. But, if you're that curious or that impatient, and hey, I'm not here to judge, here's the first 16 minutes of episode 4 - 'Dark Room' - for you to watch. There aren't many huge story spoilers for those that have kept up to date with previous episodes, it's more like flavouring for everything to follow.

We'll be doing another spoiler-filled episode of our Life is Strange podcast in the not too distant future, so make sure to get the full episode played in the meantime. We have lots to discuss.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's final DLC, Reckoning, has been detailed prior to its 4th August release on Xbox Live.

PlayStation and PC versions will follow approximately 30 days later.

As expected, it includes four new maps along with the final chapter of the Exo Zombie saga with Descent. This will include the new Trident Reflected Energy Weapon along with actors Bruce Campbell, Bill Paxton, Rose McGowan and Jon Bernthal.

If you've always loved Ico for its sparseness - the wind-blasted ruins, the empty space, the near total absence of an overbearing backstory - you probably had mixed emotions about this week's news that fans have datamined the game and discovered that the original script was far longer than the final cut. 115 lines of dialogue for an entire game is hardly chatty, of course, but Ico as we have it now is all about restraint, about the things that go unsaid or unexplained. Will Self has a wonderful word that's worth reappropriating for this kind of thing: under-imagined. It's not a criticism at all in this context (or in his original context), just an acknowledgement that if showing is better than telling, sometimes not showing or telling is better than both.

Ico's not the only game that we're learning more about long after the fact. Far more delightful is a recent story about Fallout 3 that suggests that, in order to create the effect of a player riding a subway train, the player was actually wearing the subway train in question. First-person viewpoints can hide an awful lot of fudging: the only thing that truly matters is what ends up on the screen, after all. We expect this trickery with cinema, where years of Behind-the-Scenes TV shows have meant that we now know that the rocks are polystyrene, the skyline is digital, and that, just out of view, the actors can see a bunch of ladders and lighting rigs and assistant directors drinking Frappuccinos. With games, it's a little different perhaps - more along the lines of the mutated spinal monstrosities that Crytek relied on to get crouch animations right for Crysis 2 - but the hidden world is still there, jury-rigged, Scotch-taped, and endearingly human.

The humanity of this stuff is what I find most fascinating: that hidden in the code you get traces of the people who made the game. It's everywhere in code, I gather: comments explaining how a thing operates, or why a thing operates in a very strange way, tacked inside everything from the stuff that controls cashpoint interfaces to the workings of an old NES cartridge. Normally we never get to see this, and that's fine. Because it means on the rare occasions we do get to see it, it makes all the more impact.

Randy Pitchford is showing me an email he received a day ago on his phone. In it someone asks the Gearbox Software boss whether Aliens: Colonial Marines, which came out in February 2013 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, will be remastered for PlayStation 4 or released as part of the PlayStation Plus subscription service.

"That exists, and we get those all the time," Randy tells me. We're in a bright and tidy room at the Hilton Metropole on Brighton's seafront. It's the end of day two at the Develop conference. We're doing this interview hours after Pitchford's keynote talk, in which he performed a few fancy card tricks (Randy was once a professional magician), discussed feedback from fans, positive and negative, as well as his motivation for game creation. He also mentioned he'd quite like to make another Duke Nukem game, but would probably need to partner with another developer to do it. Some headlines generated by the talk picked up on Randy saying some people who hated Gearbox's games were "sadists". That didn't go down well, as you can imagine.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1769867Thu, 23 Jul 2015 13:15:00 +0100Dishonored: Definitive Edition is half-off if you own the original

UPDATE 22/07/0215 10.30pm: This upgrade offer will also be valid on Xbox One, a Bethesda rep confirmed to Eurogamer.

As far as physical copies go, the rep told us "retailers will have trade in incentives as well. Folks should check with their preferred retailers on what those deals are."

ORIGINAL STORY 22/07/0215 5.06pm: Dishonored: Definitive Edition's PS4 version is half off its usual $40 / £30 asking price if you own the original game on PSN.

In Fallout 3's Broken Steel add-on, you repair then ride a Presidential Metro train. The bizarre image shows a character wearing a train carriage as a hat, suggesting when you ride the Metro in the game, you're inside a train car an NPC is wearing. That NPC, it suggested, would be running around underneath the tracks.

Microsoft reported its results for the fourth quarter of its 2015 financial year, and while the company made a gargantuan loss, Xbox and the division it sits in made a tidy profit.

Microsoft generated $22.2bn in revenue for the quarter ended 30th June 2015, but it made a loss of $2.1bn because of the eye-watering $7.5bn charge related to its £4.6bn purchase of the Nokia phone business, its recently-announced restructuring drive, which costs $780m, and a $160m charge related to its restructuring plan. That's a lot of costly restructuring.

Arc System Works' anime-style fighting game BlazBlue Chrono Phantasma Extend is coming to Europe in 2015, publisher PQube has confirmed.

BlazBlue Chrono Phantasma Extend is the first BlazBlue to be released on the new generation of consoles (it's out for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), and includes 28 playable characters, as well as the stories from previous games Calamity Trigger and Continuum Shift.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1769412Tue, 21 Jul 2015 15:02:00 +0100WRC 5 gets a new trailer, and a new developer for the series

Fast cars! Dirty cars! Gravel in your face cars! The world of rally has always been fertile ground for games, and this year we've been treated to the welcome surprise of Codemasters' Dirt Rally, which is currently in Early Access as it works its way towards a final release. Let's not forget that other, officially licensed series, which this year sees a new developer parachuted in, and which has just received an all-new trailer.

You might not have heard of the new developer Kylotonn, a Paris-based outfit who were previously most famous for the Bet on Soldier series (no, me neither). But! They've been on something of a recruitment drive, and heading up the team for WRC 5 is Test Drive Unlimited 2's lead programmer and Simbin's former creative director. Now that's some heritage.

WRC 5 is out on pretty much every platform there is this October, hitting Xbox One, PS4, PC, PS3, Xbox 360 and the Vita.

Did Hideo Kojima know that Konami would one day remove his name from the marketing of his directorial efforts all the way back in early 2014?

An Easter egg in Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes suggests he may have predicted this fallout with his publisher at least a year and a half ago.

Captured by YouTuber timesplitter88, one of the unlockable trials for Ground Zeroes' Deja Vu mission tasks players with erasing the logos of every Metal Gear game directed by Hideo Kojima. By picking up a special gun you can omit these logos by shining a light upon them.

That's if you already own the Kombat Pack. Otherwise he's sold separately from 28th July.

MKX marks the ninja's first appearance as a playable character in the Mortal Kombat series. Previously, he'd popped up in action game Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, and then in the Vita version of 2011's Mortal Kombat.

Sega has joined the rest of the internet by inserting snippets of actor Shia LaBeouf's bats*** insane motivational speech into another video. In this case, LaBeouf inspires Sonic to "just do it" and kick Doctor Eggman's butt at the conclusion of Sonic Generations.

For the uninitiated, back in May LaBeouf offered one of the most nonsensical motivational speeches in history to the mischievous hands of the internet. Naturally, mankind took LaBeouf's baffling screams and turned it into a popular meme. The weird part is that this isn't just another fan edited offering, but is rather part of Sega's official Sonic the Hedgehog YouTube channel.

"We've just released a new (fictional) DLC for Sonic Generations that adds actual cannibal Shia Lebouf into one of the game's final cutscenes," Sega claimed in its YouTube notes.

UPDATE 4.25pm: Activision has now formally announced the Prototype bundle with a press release and a European date for the PS4 edition - which curiously won't be available until next Wednesday, 22nd July.

The Xbox One version is already available and has been since this morning.

Finally, Prototype and its sequel will eventually be available to buy separately - but not until 12th August. Until then, you'll have to buy both together if you want either one of the two.

Activision has released its debut trailer for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5.

This latest entry in the skateboarding franchise will feature 20-player simultaneous online multiplayer on current-gen consoles. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, however, will feature no online play whatsoever.

THPS5 also includes a level editor, so you can craft your own skate parks.

Hello Eurogamers! You catch us in the midst of celebrating Outside Xbox's one million YouTube subscribers, which is a frankly ridiculous number of YouTube subscribers. After the PewDiePie fiasco this week we don't want to provoke speculation about our own vast wealth, but let's just say we were finally able to splash out on Yorkshire Gold teabags in this week's grocery shop.

Show of the Week is part of the festivities, but it also casts a tattooed eye over Mirror's Edge Catalyst and the least regrettable bits of body art in videogaming.

As part of the glassy eyed nostalgia, we also reminisced over the 11 times we were just the worst at stealth during the hundreds of Let's Play gameplay videos we have created. One thing is for sure: people don't come to us for a masterclass in gaming skills.

Fallout 3 wasn't a bad game - far from it - but its successor Fallout: New Vegas was most definitely better. This was a sequel that righted Fallout 3's few wrongs, setting players loose in a grittier, grimier, morally murkier nuclear wasteland, a world far removed from the Disneyland apocalypse of its predecessor, where the light side was zany and the dark side was only ever awful rather than crushingly bleak. New Vegas was more mature and morally challenging. It was also, depending on your personal feelings about the politics of the main factions, utterly chilling.

I'm talking about moments such as Caesar and his Legion. I hated these retrogressive, unnecessarily savage bellends from the moment I first saw them at Nipton, and I hated them because what they represented was genuinely scary. The Legion lifestyle seemed far more horrific than Eulogy Jones' little operation in Fallout 3. Slavery was just one of several ingredients in Caesar's awfulness cake.

Yet the set-up never seems overly sensational, or underscored with villainous cliche. When you meet Caesar, he's terrifyingly sane. His vision is clear, his actions informed by persuasive logic, but his idea of Roman standards of human rights becoming the dominant moral philosophy was repugnant. In 2015, given the shocking brutality in the Middle East, it feels scary in a far starker fashion. Swap the Mojave desert for that terrifying stretch of Syria and Iraq, and Fallout New Vegas becomes tragically prescient.

Survival horror Resident Evil 0 has assumed a few forms over the years, and Capcom has released a cool new video that shows how it's changed.

The video, below, looks at a couple of scenes as they appear in an early prototype version of Resident Evil 0, the 2002 GameCube original, and the upcoming PC, PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One HD Remaster.

We see copper Rebecca Chambers as well as bad boy Billy Coen, and of course plenty of zombies. And terrible dialogue and voice acting.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 has announced its Zombie Mode, Shadows of Evil. It stars Jeff Goldblum, Heather Graham, Neal McDonough, Ron Perlman, and Robert Picardo as super powered slicksters fighting the undead in a jazzy 1940s film noir-inspired world.

Revealed today at San Diego Comic-Con, Shadows of Evil looks a little something like this:

The short blurb about the plot Activision provided noted that players assume the roles of four characters - The Magician, The Femme-Fatale, The Cop and The Boxer - as they investigate the nefarious Shadow Man who is ostensibly behind all the undead shenanigans.

Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance developer Platinum Games has released a new trailer showing off more of its upcoming Transformers Devastation.

We get to see more of the game's combat system in which you can switch between vehicle and mechanical man forms at will. It looks like the crux of the action is a brawler, but you will be able to drive - and possibly fly - in vehicular form.

More excitingly, it appears like there may be multiplayer as some scenes show multiple character brawls where duplicates of the same character are in the fray. Multiple Optimus Primes duking it out suggest that this could be the spiritual successor to Platinum's cult classic Anarchy Reigns.

All of the Doctor Whos are in Warner Bros. Interactive's Lego Dimensions game - but only Peter Capaldi has done voice acting.

Capaldi, who plays the 12th Doctor, Jenna Coleman, who plays Clara Oswald, and Michelle Gomez, who plays Missy, all voice their respective characters from the show.

There's a new trailer, below, that shows Doctor Who gameplay. The TARDIS is in Gotham City and Hill Valley, the Doctor is alongside Homer Simpson in Aperture Science, rides a haunted mine car with Scooby and Shaggy, and fights alongside Kai and Cragger in a Ninjago battle arena. Video games!